Jack of three trades, master of one: Ars reviews the Motorola Atrix 4G

In our review of the new Motorola Atrix 4G, we found that the Atrix is an …

In a similar vein, the phone has only two ports: a micro-USB for charging, and an HDMI port for media. The HDMI allows the Atrix to transmit power and its interface to the lapdock, which we will get to shortly, and to play audio and video on a larger screen through the media dock, which we will also get to shortly.

In the past, I've found the performance of most Android phones to be choppy when swiping between screens, scrolling, or opening apps. The Atrix is the first Android phone that doesn't annoy me with this problem—transitions in Android 2.2 Froyo are smooth, as is scrolling or swiping. The smooth and snappy feel of the phone can likely be credited to its 1GHz dual-core Cortex A9 processor and 1GB of RAM. Likewise, games are very fast and responsive, though the Web browser still seems to struggle occasionally to keep up with pinch-zooming; often, the phone acts like it has to reload the entire page just to zoom in or out.

We ran a few benchmarks in order to compare the Atrix to other models in a similar class, and the Atrix is extremely fast. The Atrix punished other comparable phones in its Quadrant benchmarks, shown above. To be fair, the most recent generation of phones came out between a year and six months ago. But the Atrix is a harbinger of the generation of phones to come, where the most competitive will be packing dual core processors of at least 1GHz and at least 1GB of RAM. And a beautiful generation it will be.

The Atrix also soundly beat the iPhone 3GS and the Nexus One in running Sunspider. It seemed to vastly underperform when running Linpack, as shown above, a result that probably has a fair amount to do with the fact that it's still on Android 2.2.

While the modem built into the Atrix, a Qualcomm MDM6200, can support network speeds of up to 14.4Mbps, I wasn't able to get even close to that limit. Granted, I rarely saw all five reception bars present and accounted for at the top of the screen, but the area I am in is covered by AT&T's HSPA+ level network, which is a slight step up from 3G. The fastest speeds I saw out of the Atrix were 3.76Mbps down, 0.33 up (it stuck to a 0.3Mbps upload speed regardless of reception) while at the same time and in the same location my AT&T iPhone 3GS was getting 2.10Mbps down, 0.22 up on 3G.

Call quality is great on the Atrix, even when the reception dropped down to a single bar. The external speaker, which like the sleep switch sits where the back of the phone banks into the bottom side, is fine for phone calls. As you'd expect, the sound quality you get while playing music isn't stellar, but would work in a pinch.